Both key principles of India’s nuclear policy — ‘no first use’ and ‘massive retaliation’ — are dated and, ideally, should be junked. The BJP has done well to promise at least a re-look at the doctrine, if it comes to power
For some bizarre reason, the Press and some ‘experts’ have chosen to interpret the BJP’s promise to “revise and update” India’s nuclear doctrine as a promise to do away with the ‘no first use’ pledge. Yet, the bulk of strategic experts in the country have been calling for just such a revision to reflect current reality. The 2003 doctrine had already diluted the pledge stating that India will respond to chemical and biological strikes with nuclear weapons.
In 2010, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon did away with any pretence and said ‘no first use’ was only applicable to non-nuclear weapons states. That statement was perhaps the only good thing that came out of the UPA2 Government. It slipped under the radar a major and necessary doctrinal change, that needed to be enforced, using the Congress’s image of helplessness and cluelessness on security matters to shield the announcement from scrutiny and criticism.
Had a BJP Government attempted the same thing, all hell would have broken loose.Now, if a newly elected BJP-led regime decides to do away with ‘no first use’, nobody can blame it. But the BJP needs to gear up its PR machinery to pass the buck onto the Congress instead of playing up the nationalism card.
However, there are two issues that are deeply contradictory and flawed with India’s 2003 nuclear doctrine — ‘no first use’ and ‘massive retaliation’. ‘No first use’ was incorporated to reassure Pakistan, but it did not. The ‘massive retaliation’ clause was meant to scare China, but it did not. Instead, ‘no first use’ use left us defenceless against China, and ‘massive retaliation’ made our ability to push the button dependent on the character of the Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister of the last 10 years who could not even appoint his own Ministers, was hardly going to push the red button.
The ‘no first use’ clause never made any sense. If we take former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s assertion that China was the driving factor behind the 1998 Shakti tests, then India’s fear of China is one of complete conventional collapse, akin to 1962. Such a fear can only be laid to rest when military units have the safety of nuclear weapons, just in case they fail.
Similarly, the only thing that can deter China from a repeat of 1962 is not the possibility that India may nuke its eastern seaboard, but a threat to vapourise its military units in Tibet. However, India’s dogged adherence to the ‘no first use’ policy has meant that China has felt comfortable retaining numerical superiority and having the height advantage.
Consequently, unable to equalise China with tactical nuclear weapons, India’s military has gone into a state of utter paranoia. It has indulged in ruinous spending on a massive conventional weapons build-up, mostly aimed at countering China. The question here is: Can the Indian military be blamed for spending so recklessly when it has been denied the weapons that will help it equalise the Chinese threat for significantly less sums of moneyIJ
The second issue is India’s love of the term, ‘massive retaliation’. What this means is that, if Pakistan were to launch a single nuclear strike, even a small one, against our Armed Forces, India will annihilate Pakistan. Sounds deadly, doesn’t itIJ In fact it is more brain dead than deadly.
Far from serving India’s purposes, ‘massive retaliation’ gives Pakistan reason enough to not respond with a single strike for conventional collapse, but instead go in for an all-out strike against India. This is because it knows fully well that even a single strike will bring the entire Indian nuclear stockpile on its head.
Also, Pakistan is on legally solid ground here and India is not. While the use of nuclear weapons has been held legal, the legality is subject to the rules of war and proportionality. If Pakistan uses a single device to stop an Indian advance, that is legal. If Pakistan decides in its first strike to wipe out most of India, claiming it housed missiles that were about to be launched against Pakistan, even that is legal under the doctrine of pre-emption.
On the other hand, India wiping out all of Pakistan in response to one nuclear strike is illegal, under the laws of proportionality. ‘Massive retaliation’, therefore, suffers from a serious lack of operational and legal credibility.
Curiously, however, many experts maintain that removing ‘massive retaliation’ would defang India’s nuclear doctrine. This is a dangerous argument. It presumes that somehow ominous-sounding words substitute for spineless leadership. Deterrence is based on two aspects — capability and political will.
While India’s capability is getting better, statements such as the one made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2009 that nuclear weapons were unusable and useless, cancel out any improvements in capability. Doctrines, therefore, need to be leadership proof and ‘massive retaliation’ makes the doctrine less credible, not more credible. If the BJP gets rid of the ‘no first use’, that’s very good; if it gets rid of ‘massive retaliation’, even better.
Seen from that angle, the criticism of the international Press is actually a good thing because it means the West actually thinks a BJP leadership is crazy enough to push the button. This is not a bad kind of ‘crazy’; this is the good kind because what looks ‘crazy’ to the West serves as effective deterrence to China.
It is important, therefore, that the West should think India has a leadership ‘crazy’ enough to push the button. Because the Chinese leadership and military take the Western Press, Western think-tanks and Western Government assessments seriously. To convince the West that India will push the button is to convince China.
Far from getting upset with The New York Times editorial, replete with factual errors though was, India should be thanking it. One Op-ed in that newspaper has succeeded in restoring, albeit partially, the deterrence that the UPA regime frittered away over the last 10 years.